Be it polemical or journalistic, it's still a pleasure to read, and at the end of the day he's got a good point to make: The thing to do is to go there and look and to keep an open mind about what you see. Try to understand your biases and allow for them, try to be an innocent eye until you've got all the facts. He's forever stopping and asking himself, "why am I assuming this?" when his middle class instincts kick in, but he doesn't always beat back his leftist instincts with the same stick. His more broad and "primitive" leftist instincts -- amounting almost to a primitive Christianity in spirit -- are where he ends up "standing" to observe the rest.

We've got as much to learn from Orwell's ideas about method as from his application of that method or from his conclusions. We've got a lot to learn from his prose because he wrote clearly, simply, and calmly. Orwell allowed for some of his biases but not others. He swung and he missed. We're up next.